WebGL draft published, Khronos seeks community involvement

Mozilla and the Khronos Group have announced the availability of the first …

The Khronos Group has announced the availability of the first public WebGL specification draft. The document describes a new emerging Web standard that will make it possible for developers to natively integrate rich 3D graphics in conventional Web content. The Khronos Group, which is best known for its role as the maintainer of the OpenGL standard, hopes that publishing the WebGL draft will help attract third-party involvement in refining the standard.

Khronos and Mozilla began collaborating on WebGL earlier this year. The technology proved compelling and has attracted the interest of other browser vendors including Apple, Opera, and Google. Mozilla's own WebGL implementation has already been integrated into Firefox and was made available in nightly builds back in September. Apple's WebKit rendering engine also gained WebGL support at roughly the same time. The availability of multiple interoperable implementations before the publication of the actual standard is a clear sign that the browser vendors are enthusiastic about WebGL's potential and are eager to get it into the hands of users and developers.

WebGL is largely based on OpenGL ES 2.0. It makes the OpenGL APIs available through JavaScript, allowing Web developers to draw 3D graphics inside of the HTML5 Canvas element. The goal is to bring all of the power of OpenGL directly to the browser by exposing the low-level graphics APIs. In theory, the flexibility of this approach will make it significantly more useful than previous 3D Web technologies like VRML which confined developers to a handful of predefined abstractions.

Model loading and other high-level functionality will be implemented in third-party libraries on top of WebGL. Modern high-performance JavaScript engines are finally fast enough to be able to handle that kind of computationally intensive work. The major WebGL implementations support hardware-accelerated rendering, which means that the user's graphics hardware is responsible for the heavy lifting. Mozilla also has a software-based backend for computers that don't have sufficient graphics hardware.

We recently discussed the new standard with Mozilla's Arun Ranganathan—the chairman of the WebGL working group—and Vladimir Vukicevic, the Mozilla developer who created the original WebGL proof-of-concept implementation. They say that Mozilla hopes to ship a release of Firefox with WebGL included by default in 2010.

They view it as a significant addition to the expanding ecosystem of next-generation standards-based technologies for the Web. It's also a substantial milestone in the ongoing effort to make the Web a more competitive platform relative to conventional desktop software. Collaborating with Khronos opened a lot of doors, they say, and gave them a valuable opportunity to work with the hardware companies that dominate the 3D computing landscape. Now that the standard is published, they expect to see a lot more interest in WebGL, particularly in the area of tool support and libraries.

According to Vukicevic, WebGL could potentially have important implications beyond the scope of the functionality that it delivers. Writing and implementing the standard has helped to illuminate the challenges of bringing native platform APIs to a memory managed JavaScript environment. The solutions devised by the browser vendors to overcome those challenges could be useful as the Web continues to evolve.